While we're not likely to see any U.S. cruise ships hitting Cuba soon -- tourist travel remains off-limits, though you can visit on a licensed trip -- we can't help but imagine that we'll be visiting Cuba with a whole new level of accessibility in the coming years.

Last post!
I have been a DU member for 10 years, came here because of the progressive mindset of the members and the integrity demanded when one was posting.

That is mostly gone now, and replaced with much vitriol and attacking others for not conforming to their own beliefs, something I could get anywhere else.

DU was a great place to get the late breaking news before it was breaking and keeping up with current events, but now it has become a place of coercion and hate. We have gone from being a voice against war to a voice for violence. And not violence directed at anyone but just violence with the thinking that it will change the situation.

In the last week I have been flamed for being a pacifist and compared to Hitler and GOP figures because I don't believe that violence will resolve this nations justice issues. So I guess it is time for me to go and find another place that is still progressive and let you all fight it out because I just don't have it in me to support violence.

I think that comment explains a lot when asking why people vote against their own best interest. They are stupid!

Where Oil and Politics Mix

By DEBORAH SONTAG NOV. 23, 2014

After an unusual land deal, a giant spill and a tanker-train explosion, anxiety began to ripple across the North Dakota prairie.

IOGA, N.D. — In late June, as black and gold balloons bobbed above black and gold tables with oil-rig centerpieces, the theme song from “Dallas” warmed up the crowd for the “One Million Barrels, One Million Thanks” celebration.

The mood was giddy. Halliburton served barbecued crawfish from Louisiana. A commemorative firearms dealer hawked a “one-million barrel” shotgun emblazoned with the slogan “Oil Can!” Mrs. North Dakota, in banner and crown, posed for pictures. The Texas Flying Legends performed an airshow backlit by a leaping flare of burning gas. And Gov. Jack Dalrymple was the featured guest.

Traveling through the “economically struggling” nation, Mr. Dalrymple told the crowd, he encountered many people who asked, “Jack, what the heck are you doing out there in North Dakota?” to create the fastest-growing economy, lowest unemployment rate and (according to one survey) happiest population.

<snip>

Suddenly a percolating anxiety came uncorked. “The worm is turning,” Timothy Q. Purdon, the United States attorney, said in April.

It was against this backdrop that on a brisk spring day David Schwalbe, a retired rancher, and his wife, Ellen Chaffee, a former university president, walked headlong into the wind on their way to an F.B.I. office in Fargo.

A mile-long oil train was rumbling through downtown. Wordlessly, Mr. Schwalbe tightened his grip on the black binders bearing what he considered evidence, based on an unusual deal involving his family’s land, that Governor Dalrymple had a corrupt relationship with the oil industry.

‘This has David kind of nervous,” Dr. Chaffee confided. “He comes from a very below-the-radar culture.”

.Washington (CNN) -- Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina, has some harsh words for the recently released Benghazi report, led by his own party.

"I think the report is full of crap," Graham told Gloria Borger on CNN's "State of the Union" on Sunday.

"I don't believe that the report is accurate, given the role that Mike Morell (deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency at the time) played in misleading the Congress on two different occasions. Why didn't the report say that?"

The investigative report Graham is referring to was released Friday by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers, R-Michigan, and Ranking Member Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger, D-Maryland.

The report finds little to support the questions that have been raised about CIA actions on the ground in Benghazi the night of the deadly attack on September 11, 2012.

AUSTIN, Tex. — Texas’ State Board of Education has approved new history textbooks, but only after defeating six and seeing a top publisher withdraw a seventh — capping months of outcry over lessons that some academics say exaggerate the influence of Moses in American democracy and negatively portray Muslims.

The board on Friday approved 89 books and classroom software packages that more than five million public school students will begin using next fall. But it took hours of sometimes testy discussion and left publishers scrambling to make hundreds of last-minute edits, some to no avail. A proposal to delay the vote to allow the board and general public to better check those changes was defeated. “I’m comfortable enough that these books have been reviewed by many, many people,” said Thomas Ratliff, a Republican and the board’s vice chairman. “They are not perfect. They never will be.”

The history, social studies and government textbooks were submitted for approval this summer, and academics and activists on the right and left criticized many of them. Some worried that the textbooks were too sympathetic to Islam or played down the achievements of President Ronald Reagan. Others said they overstated the importance of Moses to America’s founding fathers or trumpeted the free-market system too much.

Bitter ideological disputes over what is taught in Texas classrooms have for years attracted national attention. The new books follow the state academic curriculum adopted in 2010, when Republicans on the board approved standards including conservative-championed topics like Moses and his influence on systems of law. They said those would counter what they saw as liberal biases in classrooms.

AUSTIN, Tex. — Texas’ State Board of Education has approved new history textbooks, but only after defeating six and seeing a top publisher withdraw a seventh — capping months of outcry over lessons that some academics say exaggerate the influence of Moses in American democracy and negatively portray Muslims.

The board on Friday approved 89 books and classroom software packages that more than five million public school students will begin using next fall. But it took hours of sometimes testy discussion and left publishers scrambling to make hundreds of last-minute edits, some to no avail. A proposal to delay the vote to allow the board and general public to better check those changes was defeated. “I’m comfortable enough that these books have been reviewed by many, many people,” said Thomas Ratliff, a Republican and the board’s vice chairman. “They are not perfect. They never will be.”

The history, social studies and government textbooks were submitted for approval this summer, and academics and activists on the right and left criticized many of them. Some worried that the textbooks were too sympathetic to Islam or played down the achievements of President Ronald Reagan. Others said they overstated the importance of Moses to America’s founding fathers or trumpeted the free-market system too much.

Bitter ideological disputes over what is taught in Texas classrooms have for years attracted national attention. The new books follow the state academic curriculum adopted in 2010, when Republicans on the board approved standards including conservative-championed topics like Moses and his influence on systems of law. They said those would counter what they saw as liberal biases in classrooms.